Thoughts on: Monster

I really enjoyed “Monster”. As I read, I felt more and more like the jury trying to figure out if Steve was guilty or innocent. I think what I appreciated most was that Myers did not give you a clear answer as to Steve’s guilt. No, I didn’t want him to go to jail. His comments about the horrors of being in jail made me sympathetic. After all, he is just a 16 year old boy. Why should he have to spend the rest of his youth in jail? If he got out in 23 years, he would be in his thirties! That means that the entirety of his twenties would be spent in a cell. He would never get a chance to experience life, date, have fun, make something of himself. At the same time, a crime was committed. If Steve was a part of that, he should be held accountable—even if he didn’t pull the trigger. Steve lies on the stand doesn’t he? Myers blurs many of the details. We learn from the sections that describe jail and what he is thinking that Steve was in the store. However, we also know from Bobo that Steve didn’t give any signal at all—which the two men took to mean that it was all clear. What a hard issue to deal with, and what a hard decision for the jury to make! I certainly don’t envy them their job.

At first I wasn’t sure of the connection between the article and the book. Sure, race comes up a little bit in the novel. Steve’s mom asks if they should have gotten a Black lawyer. One of the witnesses admits that she has a hard time testifying against a Black defendant. I guess that where a multi-cultural reading would come in is in where Steve was raised. He must attend a decent enough school—if he has the opportunity to take a film class. But it is clear that gangs are a part of his every day life. He is very aware of Osvaldo’s choice of friends. If Steve lived in a ritzy part of the suburbs, would he have gotten into this situation in the first place? Maybe. I am reading Mark Twain’s novel Puddn’head Wilson for another class. In this book, two boys are switched as babies. One is a slave (though he is only 1/32 Black) and the other is 100% White. No one except for the woman who switched these children knows that the “Black” child is the one who becomes educated and stands to inherit quite a fortune. But then, no one knows that the other child, who is uneducated and whose language is identical to the other slaves, is actually White. In this way, Twain breaks down the barriers of stereotypes that insisted that African Americans were slaves because they were stupid or incapable of learning. It becomes obvious that the environment played a key role in how far an African American slave could go. Now, I’m not suggesting that just because Steve is from a rough area and grew up seeing gangs and surrounded by people who were violent that he should be exempt from the laws that govern our country. Nor am I suggesting that the prosecution is targeting Steve because he is Black. What I am saying is that we must consider how environment affects who we become. There will always be those who are able to go beyond what everyone expects of them. Being from a rough area doesn’t guarantee that you will never get out or make something of yourself, but it will always be a part of how you become who you become.